Instagram is getting rid of photo maps

Instagram photo maps, which displayed the pictures you had taken according to where you had taken them, are going away. The company confirmed to Mashable today that it has begun removing the maps from the service. "Photo Map was not widely used, so we've decided to remove the feature and focus on other priorities," Instagram said in a statement. "You will still be able to see location tags on individual posts." You can still view your own map for now, but the ability to look at other people's maps has disappeared with the latest update to the app.

I had forgotten photo maps even existed until a few minutes ago. To find them you had to tap on a person's profile and then find the small-ish location icon located underneath their bio. Once you did, you found a map with stacks of photos arranged based on where you had taken them. Zoom in on the map and you could get a more fine-grained view.

This was a fun feature for Instagram employees, who are well paid and frequently travel around the world taking pictures of their adventures. But most people don't do much international travel, and so their photo maps looked like one giant stack of photos sitting on top of the city where they live. Little wonder, then, that Instagram is killing it off.